Encyclopedia
Hippie, occasionally spelled
hippy, refers to a subgroup of the
1960s countercultural movement that began in the
United States, becoming an established social group by 1965, but declining in numbers by the late 1970s. The roots of the hippie movement can be found in Europe, in the naturalist movements of the late
18th century, and the
19th century back-to-nature movement.
According to
Time-Life, hippies were against political and social orthodoxy, choosing a gentle and nondoctrinaire politics that favored peace, love, and personal freedom. Hippies came to feel that a monolithic entity had emerged—composed of corporate industry, corporate media, the military and government—that exercised undue power over their lives. They often referred to this monolithic entity as "The Establishment," "Big Brother," or "The Man."
Hippie opposition to "The Establishment" quickly spread worldwide through a fusion of early rock and roll,
folk music, the
blues and psychedelic rock that eventually redefined rock music itself. The other creative arts, especially the
dramatic arts and the
visual arts, contributed to this worldwide impact.
Moving beyond unconventional attire, long hair for both genders, facial hair for men, and rebellion against long-established institutions, hippies sought to champion and implement change. They expressed their desire for change by opposing the
Vietnam War, corporate influence, and consumerism; by criticizing Western
middle class values; by embracing aspects of non-Judeo-Christian
religious cultures ; and by adopting nomadic lifestyles. They also embraced the
Civil Rights movement, the expansion of
free speech, sexual liberation,
interracial dating, intentional community,
free love, recreational drug use, simple living, holistic health, environmental consciousness, and alternative technology.
Hippie influence was felt worldwide, especially in
Canada,
Great Britain,
Western Europe,
Australia and
New Zealand, and to a lesser extent in
Eastern Europe,
Mexico,
Argentina,
Brazil and
Japan.
The 21st century has brought with it a
neo-hippie movement, with an ethos similar to that of the original hippies.
Etymology
Reminiscing about late 1930s Harlem in his 1964 autobiography,
Malcolm X referred to the word
hippy as a term African Americans used to describe a specific type of white man who "acted more Negro than Negroes."
During the 1940s and 1950s the term
hipster, coined in 1940 by Harry Gibson, came into usage by the American Beat generation to describe jazz and swing music performers, and the term evolved to describe the bohemian counterculture that formed around the art of the time.
In 1963, British band The Swinging Blue Jeans released the song "Hippy Hippy Shake", which rose to #2 in the British charts and #24 in the US.
On the east coast of the
U.S., in
Greenwich Village, young
counterculture advocates were called, and referred to themselves as,
hips. At that time, to be hip meant to be "in the know" or "cool", as opposed to being called a stodgy "square". Disaffected youth from the suburbs of
New York City flocked to the Village in their oldest clothes to fit into the counterculture movement, the coffee houses, etc. Radio station
WBAI was the first media outlet to use the term
hippie as a pejorative term originally meaning "hip wannabes", to describe these poorly-dressed middle class youths.
The first use of the word
hippie on US television was on WNBC TV Channel 4 in New York City at the opening of the New York World's Fair on April 22, 1964. Some young
anti-Vietnam War protesters, wearing t-shirts, denim jeans and with long hair, staged a sit-in and were called
hippies by NYPD officers and reporters. The police fought with and swung their batons at them to chase them off the escalators and they fought back and were arrested. Before that date, the type was generally referred to as
beatnik was coined by Herb Caen [i] in an article in the
San Francisco Chronicle [i] on ...
.
September 5, 1965 marked the first
San Francisco newspaper story where
hippie appeared in print. Michael Fallon wrote an article about the Blue Unicorn coffeehouse entitled "A New Haven for Beatniks," and he used the term
hippie to refer to younger
bohemians. The name did not catch on in the mass media until almost two years later after
San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen began using the term
hippies in his daily columns.
In his book
Ringolevio, Emmet Grogan claims that shopkeepers operating out of the
Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco called themselves the Haight Independent Proprietors and coined the word "Hippy".
History
Antecedents
During the 1890s, there was an active movement in Europe to return to the natural life and get away from polluted, crowded cities. This movement was inspired by authors like
Friedrich Nietzsche,
Goethe,
Hermann Hesse, and Eduard Baltzer; many of these authors felt that modern material yearnings were taking people away from a balance with nature, leading to spiritual and physical diseases. As a result, thousands of young Germans turned their backs on modern society and sought a return to nature and the pagan spiritual life of their ancestors. They embraced a variety of lifestyles including
vegetarianism, fasting, raw food diets,
nudism,
organic farming, communal living, along with sun and nature worship.
These ideas were introduced into the United States over several decades as these back-to-nature Germans settled in various places around the country, some of them opening the first health food stores. Many of them moved to Southern California where they could practice their alternative lifestyle in a warm, welcoming land. Quite a few young Americans adopted the beliefs and practices of these new German immigrants out of a desire to stay healthy and avoid succumbing to disease and urban malaise.
Some young Americans formed a group called "The Nature Boys" that took to the California desert, grew organic food and espoused the back-to-nature lifestyle. One member of this group, Eden Ahbez, wrote a hit song called
Nature Boy which was recorded in 1947 by
Nat King Cole. As the song became more popular, Americans became aware of a homegrown back-to-nature movement.
Eventually a few of these Nature Boys, including the famous Gypsy Boots, made their way to Northern California in 1967, just in time for the Summer of Love in San Francisco. The psychedelic posters that announced concerts at the Fillmore Auditorium and other San Francisco venues were heavily influenced by the artist Fidus, one of the original German "hippies".
Hippie culture evolved from the Beat culture of the
1950s, and it was greatly influenced by the creation of Rock & Roll from Swing and Blues, or what was known as jump blues.
1960-1966
New Left
In his 1961 Farewell Address,
President Eisenhower had warned that the
Cold War "conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry" had led to the formation of a "military-industrial complex" that might come to exert "unwarranted influence…in the councils of government." Many Americans saw the dawning of the
Vietnam War as a fulfillment of this prediction. Taking Eisenhower’s warning to heart and believing that corporate industry, driven by greed and served by corporate media, had corrupted government to an extent that it could no longer be trusted, hippies increasingly embraced terms expressive of this distrust, such as
Big Brother, The
Establishment and
The Man.
Haight-Ashbury
Many of the earliest San Francisco hippies were former students at
San Francisco State College who had "dropped out" after they started taking psychedelic drugs and began living communally in the large, inexpensive
Victorian apartments in San Francisco's
Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. Young Americans around the country began moving to San Francisco, and by June, 1966, around 15,000 hippies had moved into the Haight.
Diggers
Hippie action in the Haight centered around the Diggers, a guerrilla street theater group that combined spontaneous street theater, anarchistic action, and art happenings in their agenda to create a "free city." The Diggers grew from two radical traditions thriving in the area during the mid-
1960s: the bohemian/underground art/theater scene, and the new left/civil rights/
peace movement.
During the mid and late 1960s, the Diggers opened stores which simply gave away their stock; provided free food, medical care, transport and temporary housing; they also organized free music concerts and works of political art.
Trips Festival
One of the first major psychedelic events in San Francisco was the Trips Festival at Longshoreman's Hall, which took place on January 21-23, 1966 and which was organized by Stewart Brand, Ken Kesey, Owsley Stanley and others. The big night, Saturday January 22, saw the Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company on stage, and 6,000 people arrived to imbibe punch spiked with LSD and witness the first major light show of the era.
Love Pageant Rally
On October 6, 1966, the San Francisco hippies staged an enormous gathering in Golden Gate Park called "The Love Pageant Rally." As explained by Allan Cohen, co-founder of the San Francisco Oracle, the purpose of the rally was two-fold — to draw attention to the fact that LSD had just been made illegal, and to demonstrate that people who used LSD were not criminals, nor were they mentally ill. Rather, people who took LSD were mostly idealistic people who wanted to learn more about themselves and their place in the universe, and they used LSD as an aid to meditation and to creative, artistic expression. Thousands of hits of LSD were distributed free at the rally, and the
Grateful Dead played; its huge success drew many more curious seekers to the Haight-Ashbury district.
Los Angeles
Los Angeles also had a vibrant hippie scene during the mid-1960s. The
Venice coffeehouses and beat culture sustained the hippies, giving birth to bands like
The Doors.
Sunset Strip became the quintessential L.A. hippie gathering area, with its seminal rock clubs
Whisky-a-Go-Go and the Troubadour. The Strip was the location of the protest described in
Buffalo Springfield's early 1966 hippie anthem,
For What It's Worth.1967-1969
Summer of Love
On January 14, 1967, the outdoor Human Be-In concert provided the initial spark for the Summer of Love. A few months later,
Scott McKenzie's rendition of John Phillips' song, "San Francisco," became a hit in the United States and Europe. The song's lyrics, "If you're going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair", inspired thousands of young people from all over the world to travel to San Francisco wearing flowers in their hair and distributing flowers to passersby, earning them the name, "
Flower Children." Bands like the
Grateful Dead,
Janis Joplin, and
Jefferson Airplane contined to live in the Haight during the summer of 1967.
But by the end of the summer, the incessant media coverage of the hippie movement led the Diggers to declare the "death" of the hippie with a parade. When the Summer of Love ended, many of the thousands of flower children returned home bringing new styles, ideas and behaviors to all major U.S. cities and European capitals. Soon London, Amsterdam, Paris, Berlin and Rome rivaled San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York as hippie centers.
Regarding this period of history, a July 7, 1967 issue of
TIME magazine, featured a cover story entitled, "The Hippies: The Philosophy of a Subculture." The article described the guidelines of the hippie code: "Do your own thing, wherever you have to do it and whenever you want. Drop out. Leave society as you have known it. Leave it utterly. Blow the mind of every straight person you can reach. Turn them on, if not to drugs, then to beauty, love, honesty, fun."
Stephen Gaskin
Beginning in 1967, Stephen Gaskin emerged as an influential figure in the development of hippie philosophical perspectives. His "Monday Night Class" started out as a writing class at San Francisco State College, where Gaskin taught English, creative writing, and general semantics. The Monday Night Class developed into a far-ranging open discussion group involving up to 1500 students and other participants from all over the San Francisco Bay Area. In 1970 Gaskin and his wife, Ina May Gaskin, led a caravan of 60 buses, vans and trucks on a cross country trip to Summertown, Tennessee, where they created an intentional community called "The Farm.” The Farm became a widely respected, spiritually-based hippie community that is still in existence.
People's Park
In April, 1969, the building of People's Park in Berkeley, California received international attention. The
University of California, Berkeley had demolished all the buildings on a 2.8 acre parcel near campus, intending to use the land to build playing fields and a parking lot. After a long delay, during which the site became a dangerous eyesore, thousands of ordinary Berkeley citizens, merchants, students, and hippies took matters into their own hands, planting trees, shrubs, flowers and grass to convert the land into a park. A major confrontation ensued on May 15, 1969, and Governor
Ronald Reagan ordered a two-week occupation of the city of Berkeley by the
National Guard.
Flower power came into its own during this occupation as hippies engaged in acts of
civil disobedience to plant flowers in empty lots all over Berkeley under the slogan "Let A Thousand Parks Bloom."
Woodstock
In August, 1969, the Woodstock Music and Art Festival took place in Bethel, New York, which for many exemplified the best of hippie counterculture. Over 500,000 people arrived to hear the most notable musicians and bands of the era, among them Ritchie Havens, Joan Baez, Janis Joplin, The Grateful Dead, Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Who, Jefferson Airplane, and Jimi Hendrix.
Wavy Gravy's Hog Farm provided security and attended to practical needs, and the hippie ideals of love and human fellowship seemed to have gained real-world expression.
Altamont
In December, 1969, a similar event took place in Altamont, California, about 30 miles east of San Francisco. Initially billed as "Woodstock West," its official name was The Altamont Free Concert. About 300,000 people gathered to hear
The Rolling Stones,
Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young,
Jefferson Airplane and other bands. The
Hells Angels provided security that proved far less beneficent than the security provided at the Woodstock event--one man was killed when he drew a gun in front of the stage during The Rolling Stones performance, and four accidental deaths occurred. There were also four births at the concert, but the violence at Altamont presaged a turn in the tide for the development of hippie culture in the United States.
1970-1973
- "Whoever marries the zeitgeist will be a widower soon." – August Everding
By 1970, the
1960s zeitgeist that had spawned hippie culture seemed to be on the wane. The events at the
Altamont Music Festival shocked many Americans, including those who had strongly identified with hippie culture. Another shock came in the form of the Tate/LaBianca murders committed in August, 1969 by
Charles Manson and his "family" of followers. Manson was a hard-core, institutionalized criminal who had been released from prison just in time for San Francisco's Summer of Love. With his long hair and the ability to charm a crowd with his guitar playing, his singing, and his rhetoric, Manson exhibited many of the outward manifestations of hippie identity. Yet Manson hardly exemplified the hippie ideals of peace, love, compassion and human fellowship; through twisted logic and psychological manipulation, he inspired his followers to commit murder.
Manson's highly publicized 1970 trial and subsequent conviction in January, 1971 irrevocably tarnished the hippie image in the eyes of the American public. Other factors--for instance, the arrival of hard drugs and their associated dependency--also contributed to the decline.
After 1971 the hippie movement gradually became less visible as a distinct social phenomenon, especially in the United States. Many hippies moved to rural locations out of a desire to pursue more simple lives; they were no longer the focus of urban mainstream media attention. And the conclusion of U.S. involvement in Vietnam after the 1973 peace accords meant that many hippies felt less compelled to engage politically.
Many Americans who had once accepted the "hippie" label chose to adopt more conventional outer personas, while holding fast to the timeless ideals that had fueled the hippie movement from its beginnings. By the early
1970s much of hippie style had been integrated into mainstream American society.
Worldview
Politics
Hippies were often
pacifists and participated in non-violent political demonstrations, such as civil rights marches, the marches on Washington D.C., and anti-
Vietnam War demonstrations, including
draft card burnings and the 1968 Democratic Convention protests. The degree of political involvement varied widely among hippies, from those who were completely apolitical to
Yippies, the most politically active hippie sub-group.
In addition to non-violent political demonstrations, hippie opposition to the Vietnam War included organizing political action groups to oppose the war, refusal to serve in the military and conducting "teach-ins" on college campuses that covered Vietnamese history and the larger political context of the war.
Some
Americans, especially
conservatives, military personnel, and
veterans, saw hippie opposition to the war as a lack of commitment to the principles of American freedom in the
Cold War battle against communism. They also felt that even non-violent public demonstrations against the Vietnam War were unpatriotic because they compromised the ability of the United States to prosecute the war.
Scott McKenzie's 1967 rendition of John Phillips' song "San Francisco," which inspired the hippie Summer of Love, became a homecoming song for all Vietnam veterans arriving in San Francisco from 1967 on. Mr. McKenzie has dedicated every American performance of "San Francisco" to Vietnam veterans, and he sang at the 2002 20th anniversary of the dedication of the Vietnam Memorial Wall. "San Francisco" became a freedom song worldwide, especially in Eastern European nations that suffered under Soviet-imposed communism.
Other songs, such as Lloyd Marcus' "Welcome Home Brother," have given voice to Vietnam veterans who felt disrespected by hippies and who lamented that fellow Americans never properly honored them for their sacrifices in serving the nation.
Although hippies were sometimes accused of verbally attacking soldiers returning home from duty in Vietnam, or participating in the torching of
ROTC buildings on college campuses, with the exception of a small radical fringe element hippies did not verbally assault military personel and did not condone acts of political violence. With the release of FBI records under the Freedom of Information Act, it has become clear that many such attacks were actually perpetrated by FBI COINTELPRO agents provocateurs operating on
J. Edgar Hoover's instructions to discredit those who opposed the Vietnam War.
Hippie political expression often took the form of "dropping out" of society to implement the changes they sought. At their inception, the back to the land movement,
cooperative business enterprises,
alternative energy, the free press movement, and
organic farming were all politically motivated hippie enterprises.
Sexual attitudes
Hippies regularly flouted societal prohibitions against
interracial dating and
marriage. They were early advocates for the repeal of
anti-miscegenation laws that the U.S. Supreme Court declared unconstitutional in 1967 , but which remained on the books in some U.S. states until 2000.
With their emphasis on
Free Love, hippies promoted many of the same
counterculture beliefs that found early expresssion in the
Beat Generation. Co-habitation among unmarried couples was the norm, open relationships were common, and both Beats and Hippies advocated for legal and societal acceptance of most forms of consensual sexual expression outside the traditional bounds of marriage and procreation, with the exception of sex with children.
With regard to
homosexuality and
bisexuality, the Beats had demonstrated early tolerance during an era when homosexual expression of any sort was still punishable by stiff prison sentences. Although hippies espoused the same accepting attitude, hippie tolerance fell short of full inclusiveness; many hippies were not particularly comfortable with homosexuality when it came to communal living arrangements.
In fact, hippie domestic life seemed largely to default to traditional gender roles, with women doing most of the work— cooking, cleaning, child care, and so on—while the men engaged in creative, artistic pursuits. Images of women in hippie art abound, generally as innocents, goddesses or muses. Most hippie entrepreneurs, philosophers, commune founders and leaders, writers and artists were men. A notable exception was Lenore Kandel, whose
Love Book got her busted for pornography in 1967.
Traditional gender roles gradually changed as hippie culture embraced modern
feminism and egalitarian principles. In 1970,
Germaine Greer,
Australian feminist and active member of the hippie movement, published
The Female Eunuch, in which she expounded on
free love, sexual liberation and the nonsensical nature of women's bras; hippie women were among the first to remove theirs.
Drugs
Marijuana
The recreational use of
marijuana had been established by the
Beats, and the drug appears in
Jack Kerouac's 1950's novel "
On The Road", which was widely read by many soon-to-be hippies.
Terry H. Anderson describes the increase in marijuana use in the 1960s: 4 percent of youth aged 18 to 25 had tried marijuana at the beginning of the decade. Twelve years later, the figure had risen to 50 percent for youth and 60 percent for college students, with some universities even higher.
Psychedelics
Hippies enlarged their repertoire of recreational drugs to include not only marijuana but also
hallucinogens such as
LSD, psilocybin, and
mescaline. The use of these drugs became common in hippie settings.
On the
East Coast of the United States Harvard professors
Timothy Leary and
Richard Alpert advocated the use of psychotropic drugs for religious purposes. Regarding LSD, Leary said, "Expand your consciousness and find ecstasy and revelation within."
Legacy
Hippies were simultaneously criticised for being both 'too idealist' and 'too shallow'. The reason in part is that the early hippies did indeed want society to become more idealistic; but as hippie style began grow more and more mainstream, some of the very elements of the society they had been rebelling against, who wanted society to be even more shallow than it already was in the 1950s, also became attracted to the more superficial aspects of the movement, as a vehicle to relax standards further. This quickly resulted in a general watering-down of the culture, fashion and philosophy aspects of the hippie movement.
By 1970, much of hippie music and fashion had thus become mainstream —large rock concerts that originated with the 1967
Monterey Pop Festival, and the 1968
Isle of Wight Festival became the norm; mustaches, beards and longer hair abounded; and colorful, multi-ethnic clothing dominated the fashion world. The media lost interest in the subculture in the mid-seventies as it went out of fashion with younger people, the war ended, and hippies became targets for ridicule with the advent of
punk rock and
disco.
During the decades since the 1960s, many of the more substantive aspects of hippie
counterculture have also became mainstream:
- Interracial dating and marriage have became much more common and are now generally accepted practices. Multiracial children of such unions, like Tiger Woods and Keanu Reeves, even enjoy a certain cachet
...
in many circles.
- Public political demonstrations are considered legitimate expressions of free speech.
- Unmarried couples of all ages feel free to travel together and live together without societal disapproval.
- Frankness regarding sexual matters has become the norm—even conservative talk radio hosts, like Dr. Laura, feel free to exclaim "Orgasms are cool!"
- In urban centers especially, and in corporate America, the rights of homosexual, bisexual and transexual people have been greatly expanded.
- Religious and cultural diversity has gained widespread acceptance, and most people are aware of at least some Eastern religious and spiritual concepts—karma and reincarnation in particular
- Co-operative business enterprises and creative community living arrangements are widely accepted.
- Interest in natural food, herbal remedies and vitamins is widespread, and the little hippie "health food stores" of the 60s and 70s are now large-scale businesses.
In general
Many hippies made, and continue to maintain, long-term commitments to the lifestyle. However, quite a few younger people hold that many hippies "sold out" during the
1980s and became consumed by materialism.
As of 2006, hippies are found in
bohemian enclaves around the world or as wanderers following the bands they love. Many have been followers of the lifestyle since it began, though their ranks also include younger people who do not consider themselves "neo-hippies."
Contemporary hippies have made use of the
World Wide Web and can be found on virtual communities such as , the largest International Hippie community on the web, or in the UK. In the
United Kingdom, the
New age travellers movement revived many hippie traditions into the
1980s and
1990s. Also, there are many events,
festivals and
parties that promote hippie lifestyles and values.
The "
boho-chic" fashion style of 2003-5 had a number of hippie features and, indeed, the London
Evening Standard used the term "hippie chic" .
Rainbow Family
In the United States some hippie types refer to themselves as "Rainbows," a name derived from the tie-dyed T-shirts they wear and, for some, from their participation in the hippie-like group, "Rainbow Family of Living Light". Since the early
1970s, they rendezvous informally on U.S. National Forest Land at
Rainbow Gatherings, with the motto "peace, love, harmony, freedom and community." Rainbow Gatherings, or World Gatherings, are also held in many other parts of the world.
Festivals
Nambassa
Between 1976 and 1981, a series of large hippie-conceived festivals called
Nambassa were held on large farms around
Waihi and
Waikino in
New Zealand- Aotearoa. These were music festivals that focused on
peace,
love, and a balanced lifestyle. In addition to music, they featured workshops and displays advocating alternative lifestyles, clean and sustainable energy, and unadulterated foods.
Nambassa is also the tribal name of a trust that has championed sustainable ideas and demonstrated practical
counterculture and alternative lifestyle methods from the early 1970s to the present.
Glastonbury Festival
Some hippies gather at organized annual festivals, such as the
Glastonbury Festival in the UK. In 2005 this festival covered 900 acres and attracted 150,000 people to see more than 385 live performances of dance, comedy, theatre, circus, cabaret and other arts.
Oregon Country Fair
The Oregon Country Fair is a three-day festival that began in 1969 as a benefit for an alternative school. The festival features hand-made crafts, educational displays and costumed entertainment in a wooded setting near Veneta, Oregon just west of Eugene. Each year the festival gathering becomes the fourth largest city in the state of Oregon.
Burning Man
The
Burning Man festival is an annual gathering that began as a 1986 San Francisco celebration and is now held in the
Black Rock Desert northeast of
Reno, Nevada. Though few participants would accept the "hippie" label, Burning Man is a contemporary expression of alternative community in the same spirit as early hippie events. The gathering becomes a temporary city , with elaborate encampments, displays and many
art cars.
Pejorative connotations
In popularizing the term, columnist Herb Caen's daily references to
hippies mostly expressed fascination and mild amusement rather than disapproval. Following his lead, many participants in the movement accepted the
hippie label and used it in a non-pejorative sense.
Among those of the
Beat Generation, the flood of 1960s youngsters adopting
Beatnik sensibilities appeared to be cheap, mass-produced imitations of the Beatnik artist community. By Beat standards, these newcomers were not clever enough to really be "hip," so
hippie was a term they used with disdain.
Conservatives of the period used the term
hippie as an insult toward young adults whom they thought unpatriotic, uninformed, and naive. Conservatives were especially critical of hippies who advocated wholesale rejection of middle class values or who espoused leftist political viewpoints.
Liberals also used the
hippie label pejoratively. They regarded hippies as lacking political sophistication and hesitated to enlist their aid in promoting progressive political objectives. They also criticized what they saw as a hippie tendency towards degeneracy.
Others used the term
hippie in a more personal way to disparage long-haired, unwashed, unkempt drug users.
In contemporary conservative settings, and especially in political discourse, the term
hippie alludes to slacker attitudes, irresponsibility, participation in recreational drug use, activism in causes considered relatively trivial, and leftist political leanings. An example is its use by the
South Park cartoon character,
Eric Cartman. In the "
Die Hippie, Die" episode , the entire town joins Cartman in his negative view of hippies after they invade South Park for a "Hippie Music Jam Festival … [creating] the largest such gathering in the history of Man."
Neo-hippies
Neo-hippies, some of whom are sons, daughters and grandchildren of the original hippies, advocate many of the same beliefs of their
1960s counterparts.
Drug use is just as accepted as in the "original" hippie days, although most neo-hippies do not consider it necessary to take drugs in order to be part of the lifestyle.
Many of today's neo-hippies were prominent in the "Dead-head" and "Phish-head" communities. They often attend music and art festivals around the United States, and the bands performing at the festivals are usually called "Jam Bands" because many of their songs contain long instrumentals similar to 1960s hippie bands. Psychedelic Trance music is also popular.
The biggest jam band hippie festival is called The
Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival. It is a four-day, multi-stage, summer camping festival held on a 700-acre farm in Manchester, Tennessee, and it is reminiscent of the festivals of the 1960s, but with the demise of the Grateful Dead and
Phish, the nomadic touring hippies are left without a seminal jam band to follow.
Hippie slang and the Wolof language
A number of words that became widely used slang among hippies can perhaps be traced to the Wolof language, which is spoken in
West Africa and is related to the Mandinka language. One possible scenario as to how these words came into English: a number of Wolof-speaking people were brought from West Africa to America as slaves, and their descendants became involved in the
Jazz and
Beatnik scenes.
European American participants in the Jazz and Beatnik scenes emulated
African American ways and language and eventually influenced the hippie movement.
- Many of these etymologies are not generally accepted by linguists :
- hep, hipi, hippy = open eyes, knowledge, wisdom, well informed, up-to-date, to open one's eyes, be aware of what is going on. Usage: "He is hip to the scene." "He's a true hippy."
- cat, -kat = friend, fellow, suffix denoting a person. Usage: "He is one crazy cat."
- hep-cat = person who understands, common phrase used in 1960s. Usage: "He's a hep-cat."
- dig, deg, dega = understand, appreciate, pay attention. Usage: "You dig what I'm saying?"
- honk, honky = white, pink, pale. Used to refer to white people. Usage: "How's it hanging, honky."
- boko, bogus, bunk = fake, deceit, fraud. Usage: "This game is bogus."
- jive, jaiv = lie, trick. Usage: "Don't jive me, fool."
- cool = calm, controlled, slow. Translation of suma, meaning cool. Usage: "Be cool man."
- okay, wo kay = everything is good. Usage: "I feel okay."
See also
;People and groups
